Q&A: Marxist Politician Sitaram Yechury

Sitaram Yechury, one of the senior-most leaders in the CPI (Marxist) and a member of the Rajya Sabha.

Sitaram Yechury, one of the most senior leaders in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, spoke in an interview this week on his party’s expectations and missteps ahead of state elections that are expected to radically alter the political landscape in India.

Kerala, where Chief Minister V.S. Achutanandan leads a Left Democratic Front government, is voting today. West Bengal, which has had a Marxist-led Left government for over three decades, will begin its polls from Monday. Edited excerpts:

Ms. Malhotra: What are your expectations from the Kerala election?

Mr. Yechury: As you know, Kerala changes its government each time there is an election, so many feel it is now the turn of the Congress-led United Democratic Front to return to power. However, during my campaigning in Kerala over the last few weeks, I noticed the Left Front has substantially regained its position. We are now neck-and-neck in this race and I won’t be surprised if we scrape through.

This is because there is no real anti-incumbency at play and the chief minister, V. S. Achuthanandan, is hugely popular. Moreover, the Left has vindicated itself by maintaining Kerala’s top position in the country on socio-economic indicators, such as health and literacy, and has been successful in alleviating the agrarian distress that has consumed farmers in other parts of the country. In the last five years, not one farmer has committed suicide in Kerala.

There is a third reason, and this is the crusade Achuthanandan has launched against corruption.

Ms. Malhotra: The Congress youth leader, Rahul Gandhi, has attacked Kerala’s Left leaders for being old and unable to lead a young India. Should older politicians give way to the young?

Mr. Yechury: Yes, they should, and you will find that a majority of our candidates are young. In fact, we have a combination of experience, wisdom and youth. This is an unfortunate controversy brought up by Rahul Gandhi because in neighboring Tamil Nadu, M. Karunanidhi, the leader of the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam, which is in alliance with the Congress, is as old as Achuthanandan—87 years—and in a wheelchair. So, politics is not about age, it’s about policy.

Ms. Malhotra: In West Bengal, it is widely expected you will lose power this time.

Mr. Yechury: We have had a bad run in the 2009 parliamentary elections and in elections to the local bodies last year, but we have identified our weaknesses. Primarily we did not do adequate homework on the question of land acquisition.

When we got a three-fourths majority in the 2006 Assembly polls, we presumed that the people had voted for our policies. On the basis of this electoral victory, we took the people for granted. But when we began to subsequently acquire land to set up industries in Singur [for the Tatas to build a car factory] and Nandigram [to build a chemical hub], we realized that this was not the case. [Both projects were eventually abandoned, and the Tata Nano plant moved to Gujarat—India Real Time.]

I think the people have now seen that we have sincerely corrected our mistakes. They realize that the opposition doesn’t really have a credible, alternative program. Mamata Bannerjee, the leader of the Trinamool Congress, has been part of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government at the Center until 2004 and since then is in an alliance with Congress. She remained with the BJP-led alliance even after the Gujarat pogrom against Muslims in 2002.

Ms. Malhotra: How did you go so wrong on land acquisition?

Mr. Yechury: If you look at what happened in Singur, where the Tatas wanted to acquire 1,000 acres of land, we found that as many as 12,000 people had taken monetary compensation from the government. Which meant that the land reform the Left undertook after 1977, that gave land to the tiller or the sharecropper under ‘Operation Bargadar’ (Operation Sharecropper), had led to such a fragmentation of the land that it was no longer viable to cultivate it.

We realized that this phase of land reforms had run its course. The only way out was to make a paradigm shift and speedily move towards industrialization. As I said before, we should have done our homework much more thoroughly, discussed the issue much more intimately with the people. But we do recognize the shift in ground reality.

Ms. Malhotra: In retrospect, do you think the Left’s decline in power at the Center can be dated to the time you withdrew from the Manmohan Singh-led government over the Indo-US nuclear deal?

Mr. Yechury: It was a very critical factor. We had very little option but to withdraw support. The deal was extraneous to the Common Minimum Program, which we had forged at the time [with Congress]; nevertheless the nuclear deal played an important role in forging the unity of the opposition.

Ms. Malhotra: Do you feel that the Congress government, in its second incarnation, has lost its pro-poor moorings?

Mr. Yechury: Definitely. When we supported the Congress in its first incarnation, it was on the basis of a common agenda; this time around there is no programmatic direction. Every ministry is running its own agenda. This explains the disarray in the government.

This time the Congress is going full steam ahead with its economic liberalization programs. India withstood the global financial meltdown because of our caution, but now I’m not so sure.

In the last few years, we have seen the growth of two Indias, the Shining India with as many as 69 billionaires whose combined asset value is one-third of the country’s GDP, and on the other hand, the real India, where a re-evaluation of poverty estimates tell us that 40 per cent of the population is below the poverty line.

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